It is not necessary for me to have an opinion on that

(Rejoice, for there is no hope!)

As I was coming home from work, I wondered whether my son had been selected to be on a jury. He had been called in to the district court that day for jury duty, but only a minority of those called in end up on a jury (‘Many are called but few are chosen’).

My thought process was something like this:

‘If he gets selected then the trial will clash with some commitments he has in the next few weeks that matter quite a lot to him. So from that point of view it would be better for him not to be selected.

On the other hand, sitting through a long trial and hearing first-hand stories from people who lead far less privileged lives than we do would be a tremendous opportunity for learning and growth for him, albeit maybe somewhat harrowing.

Dear me, what shall I hope for? Shall I hope that he is selected or that he is not?‘

Then that precious thought came to me that has often entered my mind recently:

‘It is not necessary for me to have an opinion on that‘.

Whether he gets selected or not is outside my control. Whichever happens, we shall try to make the best of the situations that arise. There is no need, and no point, in hoping for one outcome or the other.

So I didn’t. I just shut the thought process down and moved on to something else.

I aim these days to completely banish hope from my life.

That may sound bleak. But it isn’t. The apparent bleakness is just an artefact of our peculiar Western culture. We are taught to hope from an early age. The sentence ‘There is no hope‘ is regarded within Western culture as synonymous with despair and misery. Yet there is no reason at all that it should be so. If we can learn to be content with the present moment, what need have we of hope?

This message has a strong presence in many cultures in India and farther East. It is not unknown in Western culture, but its presence is less strong than in the East. In Western thought it is principally manifest in the Ancient Greek philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism.

I blame Saint Paul for the Western preoccupation with Hope. It’s that famous passage in Corinthians where he says that the three greatest virtues are Faith, Hope and Love. I’m not Paul’s biggest fan but, in between the misogyny and the homophobia, he did have his good moments. And I reckon the poor old fellow got unfairly misinterpreted on that epistle. His point wasn’t that faith and hope are particularly great. It was that love is far more important than the other two. Surely that’s something we can agree on. Paul may think faith and hope are pretty good. I think they’re rubbish! But at least we agree that love is much more important. If Paul says that love is what makes the world go around, then I applaud him, even if he wants to spend some of it on his god rather than on his fellow humans and other suffering animals, who need it so much more. Perhaps he finds it hard to love other humans, and loving his god helps him to love others as well. If so then loving God first sounds like a good strategy, for him. For me it actually works the other way around. I find humans more lovable than the idea of God because of their (our!) frailness, limited understanding, cantankerousness and emotional vulnerability. Virtue of the beloved is only very rarely a reason for love. Parents do not love their toddlers because of their great virtue (what virtue?) but because of their vulnerability, because they need us so much.

I grew up to feel that I ought to hope that certain things would happen and that others wouldn’t. It was almost as though by hoping I increased the likelihood of the desired event happening. Hoping was like a duty, and to fail to hope was somehow remiss.

I don’t know whether I am unusual in that regard or whether it is a common feeling of people in our culture. But in any case, What a lot of nonsense!

My hoping or not hoping has no effect at all on what will happen! What matters is what I do, not what I hope. If I am concerned at the lack of compassion shown to refugees and the lack of action about climate change, I can lobby politically for those causes, express strong views in the public arena, try to personally help refugees and the environment, and donate lavishly to organisations that work towards those ends. Hoping at the same time for success doesn’t seem likely to increase the effectiveness of my actions.

In some ways, hoping may make my actions less effective. If I am constantly longing for success, I may become discouraged and give up acting if the prospect of success does not become progressively stronger. Then the cause will suffer. But if I act not out of hope but out of a belief that the actions are right then the activity is its own reward. If success follows, so much the better, but if not it does not mean that I have failed or that my time was wasted.

Imagine having a family member or close friend with a very serious illness. It seems natural to hope for their recovery, and to hope that they will not deteriorate, suffer and die. But what good does that hope do? What is needed is to do whatever we can to alleviate their suffering, maximise their chances of recovery and let them know that they are loved. If we waste mental energy and thinking time on wishing for a recovery, we will miss the opportunity to fully experience and value the time we have with them now. So let us do what we can to help, focus on valuing our time with them, and leave the things we cannot control to work themselves out, in whatever way they must.

Imagine a damaged passenger aeroplane that is plummeting towards the ground. Should the occupants hope to be saved? Well, the pilots should be focusing on the technical problem of how to regain control of the plane, not on hope. The cabin crew should be focusing on ensuring the passengers are all seated, strapped in, braced and know the emergency procedures, not on hope. The passengers themselves have less to do. But they can comfort one another – speak words of encouragement and love, help calm fears, hold hands, supply and dispose of airsickness bags. Or if seated alone, they can meditate on the inevitability of death – if not now then later – and try to achieve a state of acceptance. Or even sing! The orchestra on the Titanic that played as the ship went down is legendary, not because they brought hope, because there was none, but because they brought relative calm, courage and acceptance.

Let me restate: there is nothing new in this. The message has been preached for thousands of years in Stoicism, Epicureanism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. It is only because our Western culture so often demands that we have hope, that there is any need to remind ourselves of the message.

My reason for discouraging hope is not only that it can distract from practical, helpful action. It is also that it is doomed to fail.

When we hope, we wish our life away. We diminish the importance of the present moment in order to elevate the importance of a potential future state. But if we prioritise the future over the past, what happens? As John Maynard Keynes said ‘In the long run we are all dead‘. Now I have nothing against death. It is a natural part of life, and is only sad when it comes too soon, too painfully, or leaves dependants in desperate circumstances. But while it is not bad, neither is it especially good. It is not something to be aspired to. It is simply blank, neutral (in fact it is, literally, nothing!). So the final consequence of hoping for the future, at the expense of diminishing the present, is to aspire towards the blankness of death, which seems a particularly empty and uninspiring goal.

It may be that in certain extraordinary circumstances hope may be beneficial. Perhaps parents whose child has disappeared, suspected kidnapped, may find that hope is helpful to them. My guess is that, even in those horrible circumstances, time spent thinking about hope may be more upsetting than time spent focusing on the practicalities of doing whatever one can to save the child. But I have no experience of such a situation, so my ideas are mere idle speculation. All I can say is that, although I have often hoped in the past, sometimes being quite obsessed by it, I have never experienced circumstances in which hope was helpful, and I cannot imagine any circumstances where I would expect it to be helpful.

I have one last reason for objecting to hope, and that is when it is used to focus beyond death, on a potential after-life. It is entirely reasonable and understandable that some people want to believe in an after-life. It is only when it starts affecting their actions in this world that it can become a problem. The after-life has been used as an excuse for terrorism (jihadists blowing themselves up in crowded market-places so they can go straight to Paradise where seventy-two virgins await them), for inaction on social justice (the poor will ‘receive their consolation in heaven’), and for inflicting self-misery (Roman Catholics with irretrievably broken marriages denying themselves the possibility of being in love again, because such ‘adultery’ would damn their immortal soul).

Maybe there’s an after-life and maybe there isn’t. But what we can be sure of is that no human knows anything about it. So whatever other humans tell us about it, whether in speech or via books such as the Bible or Quran, is pure speculation. Hence I suggest we treat after-life stories as just one more interesting, unfalsifiable hypothesis, like string theory, and get on with loving and helping one another here and now.

Notwithstanding all that, I still frequently find myself wondering which of two alternative potential events to wish for, when the outcome is entirely outside my control. Which should I hope for? Quick, this is important! Don’t hope for the wrong one! My running partner is five minutes late for our lunchtime jog and I’m tired. I wouldn’t mind giving the jog a miss today. Shall I hope that they don’t turn up so I can give my tired body a rest, or shall I hope they do turn up because I really need to lose that extra smidgeon of weight? What a responsibility! How can I decide? Then the blessed thought returns to save me: